Analyst outfit TrendForce claims that HDDs and SSDs are getting squeezed as the industry drowns in datasets, checkpoints and logs.

It said that big-capacity “nearline” hard drives now come with lead times of more than 52 weeks.

Western Digital has already fired off letters warning customers of “unprecedented demand for every capacity in its portfolio” while jacking up prices. This is “to support growth and ensure excellence” rather than to line its own pockets, apparently.

Nearline drives sit in the awkward middle ground between fast SSDs and tape archives, holding warm data that’s not quite cold but not hot enough to justify burning NAND. Trouble is, generative AI doesn’t just spew endless junk text and images, it vomits petabytes of training data, checkpoints, inference logs and bias audits that all need to be stored, sometimes for regulators who want to make sure your chatbot isn’t secretly MechaHitler.

That’s why demand for nearline storage is going vertical. You can’t toss this stuff into offline archives too quickly, but it’s way too fat to sit on pricey SSDs.

Hyperscalers are panicking and eyeing cheap QLC SSDs to patch the gap, even if they cost four to five times more per gigabyte than hard drives.

SSD makers smell the blood in the water and are working on enterprise products tuned for nearline workloads, but that won’t save anyone in the short term. Expect enterprise SSD prices to climb, right alongside HDDs, as cloud providers buy up everything in sight.

Gamers and home users probably won’t see shortages right away, but if you were planning to snag an SSD upgrade, now’s the time before the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street push the next round of price hikes.